


Ice Pick

by anahita



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Fire, M/M, Post-Canon, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 19:06:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19026076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anahita/pseuds/anahita
Summary: It will be funny one day.





	Ice Pick

 

The long difficult day ends in bed with a whiskey and a pack of cigarettes. He leaves the window and it lets in freezing air. He falls asleep quickly and wakes to the phone ringing. “Hathaway,” he sets his glass down on the bedside table. Lucky it didn’t slip. There’s time enough for a quick smoke outside his door in the pre-dawn light. Here it is. The cigarette brings no joy but relief and he smokes it ruthlessly. 

It’s raining by the time he gets to the crime scene. Lizzie is a minute behind. They bend down together over the twin bodies, actual twins, arranged like a mirror image. The twins touch hands and gaze at each other. “Crikey,” Dr. Sharma says when they ask for the cause of death. “Give me a minute alone with the wonder twins, won’t you?” 

Lizzie drives them to the office and another day. They take a break at noon for lunch, and James stands outside the cafe to smoke away from everyone. 

“Repulsive habit,” says a mother with two sons. 

“Can I bum one?” asks a girl who is the exact image of the dead twins. 

The twins turn out to be triplets. James is the one to break the news to the girl, Emma, when they get her back to the office. She thinks they’re lying until she sees the bodies. She cries. He gives her his clean handkerchief. Lewis was the one who taught him to always have one on hand. It’s the third one he has lost in as many weeks, but he doesn’t mind. She needs it more than him. 

He smokes in front of the station before getting into his car. 

“Goodnight, sir,” says Lizzie. 

He falls asleep with a cigarette in his hand and wakes to his bed on fire. 

 

It will be funny one day. He’ll look back at this and laugh. It will happen for him. That’s how it always is, and even if he never quite laughs, he’ll at least forget it, just like he’s forgotten so much else, all the things he doesn't recount even on grim days such as this. They might flash through his mind but he usually lets them slide down again somehow, like a greying body in water. 

It’s twice now he has survived fire. He shakes is head as watches the firetrucks. He’s still a little drunk. The paramedic wrap a shock blanket around his shoulders. “No one was hurt,” Lizzie repeats again and James shakes his head. He’s not sure who is telling whom what. 

“Sir,” Lizzie grabs his elbow. 

“This will be—we’ll laugh,” James says after a moment.

Lizzie looks lost.

 

James wakes on Lizzie’s sofa. He groans when he remembers the night before. Is it always fire? “From what I have tasted of desire/I hold with those who favor fire.” He was just so silly last night in the face of disaster that it embarrasses him. He’s been to more crime scenes than he remembers but somehow a fire set off by his own obstinate recklessness reduced him to a shocked bystander. He’d also been drunk enough that he spent a good ten minutes fumbling at the buttons of his phone before dialing emergency, not to mention his stumbling and falling to his neighbors, who had looked at him with bewilderment before listening.

“No one was hurt?” James asks as he cooks them eggs. 

“No,” Lizzie stuffs her mouth with bread. “Thank God.” 

James can tell she wants to say more as they make their way to the office.

“Look,” Lizzie says as she parks. “Don’t smoke in bed—“

“I know,” James says and makes to open the door. 

“Don’t fall asleep while smoking—”

“I know, sergeant,” James says they walk to the station. 

She wants to say more but they have work to do. 

 

He goes to see his apartment later. The fire didn’t spread further than the bedroom. He remembers dosing it with the fire extinguisher from the hallway outside. His books are ashy but safe. His guitar survived. There was a box of photographs under his bed. The only causality that matters. He thinks about them the rest of the day. There was one of his mother. There was a photograph of his family at Lodge Farm. There was a photograph of him and Lewis at some party five years ago. He never looked at the one either. He never looked at any of them except the one of his mother and now he won’t be tempted. 

The brothers were strangulated by a thin wire. “Something like a guitar string,” Dr. Sharma says with a hand rubbing the back of his neck. They’d been sedated. The lacerations on their chest came from an icicle. The brothers were frozen when they were found. Dr. Sharma found shards of ice imbedded in their chests.

“The perfect crime,” Lizzie says with a smile as they walk out of the morgue. 

“The icicle?”

“But it didn’t work, did it?”

“It’s harder to stab someone with an icicle than is imagined.” 

“It frustrated our killer.”

“What if it wasn’t _like_ guitar string but was guitar string?”

“What makes you say that?” 

“The killer already tried one improbable murder weapon. Why not two?”

“Why not indeed.” 

“What would that tell us if it were true?”

“That our killer is imaginative, strange—”

“—and whimsical.”

 

Their whimsical killer hasn’t left them any more clues. No fingerprints. Nothing definite about the murder weapon, and only guesswork now to guide them about how and why. The twins were in the same college, lived in the same house, had the same friends and even their girlfriends were sisters. The whole thing makes James uneasy but he can’t figure out why. He’s smoking outside the triplets’ house when Emma joins him. “Bum one?” Emma says and he passes his pack. The triplets grew up in the house with their grandmother—long dead—and Emma lives here alone. She drives an hour every day to Oxford. 

“Why live here?” James says. “Why not with your brothers?”

“I couldn’t bear to leave the house.” Emma shrugs. 

“And they could?”

“They couldn’t bear to stay.” 

Emma looks lost, and suddenly James is standing outside his burning apartment with his sergeant who looked exactly how Emma looks now. James stares at his cigarette. He throws it on the ground and steps on the embers. 

“Pick that up, please,” Emma says with a grim look. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

The first night he spends on his ashy sofa. He watches the telly and drinks endless cups of tea. It’s awful. He ends up thinking again of the pictures in the box that burned. There was one of him with his sister. He was looking at the camera. Her eyes were closed. It was awkward but he had liked it. He reads again the latest email from Lewis with a postscript from Laura. He hits reply. He wants to tell him about the fire but decides against it. Better not. He’ll just say hi, but in the end he can’t even do that. He can’t say hello. He can’t say goodbye. He shuts down his phone, and wakes to Lizzie knocking on his door. 

“Why was your phone turned off?” She looks worried. 

“I—sorry.” There’s no excuse. He keeps worrying her. 

It’s a difficult day. He’s so used to—at thirty-seven—the early days of quitting, when the craving is especially brutal but not yet at the point where he usually gives up. This is his ninth attempt at quitting. He feels unglued by it. It’s as if he is the cigarettes and the lighter and the fire. He’s not sure what he is beyond the motion of his hand, the inhale, and the exhale. He twitches and tingles. He walks to the door for a break and stands outside shivering. 

“It’s freezing here. 2 degrees below. You’re well out of it,” James sends to Lewis. “My best to Laura.”


End file.
